African American Spiritual Historical Resources

1. Introduction

2. The Sound of the Spirituals in Their Original Context

3. The First Tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers

4. Countering the images of black-face minstrelsy

5. The Fisk Jubilee Singers sing for the world

6. The Popularity of Early Recordings of the Fisk Jubilee Quartet

7. Performance Characteristics of the Early Recordings

8. Musical and Social Upheaval in the Jazz Age

9. Harry T. Burleigh and the Solo Spiritual

10. Hall Johnson and the Emergence of Larger Mixed Professional Vocal Ensembles

11. Dawson and the Emergence of Large Mixed Choirs in the Historical Black Colleges

12. The Spiritual as Freedom Song

13. Performing the Spirituals Today

W.E.B.DuBois on the Spiritual, from "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903)

The Underground Railroad in Bucks County

Lourin Plant Article on Racial Barriers in Classical Vocal Music

Additional Links

A History of the African-American Spiritual

How the African-American Spiritual has maintained its integrity
in the face of major social and musical challenges

[Based on an article by Thomas Lloyd published in the August 2004 issue of the Choral Journal of the American Choral Directors Association; all rights reserved.]

6. The Popularity of Early Recordings of the Fisk Jubilee Quartet

However, the next generation of Fisk Jubilee Singers created one more major resurgence of the spiritual into mainstream American popular culture. In 1899, John W. Work II (1871-1925), a young member of the Fisk faculty, set out to reclaim the integrity of the spiritual by forming a touring male quartet, of which he was first tenor.[1] Reasons for forming a male quartet to carry on the tradition are open to speculation, but the barbershop quartet movement had begun to flourish around 1895[2], and the voicing of the Fisk quartet arrangements had some similarities with the sartorial genre, having the top voice float freely in harmony above the lead melody in the second tenor.

The development of a Fisk Jubilee male quartet may have been beneficial when ten years later Work negotiated a significant contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company for a series of commercial recording sessions. Acoustic recording at the time required performing into a large horn (seen on Victor’s famous "his master’s voice" emblem). This reduced the number of performers who could be effectively recorded. Recording engineers tended to favor strong, focused male voices over larger ensembles with a higher or more diffuse sound.[3] John Work and his early collaborators (who included James Myers, tenor, Alfred King or Leon O’Hara baritone, and Noah Ryder, bass) certainly met those requirements. Their voices were resonant, vibrant, beautifully centered, and deftly tuned. The four-voiced harmonies were perfectly balanced and rhythmically unified. These impressive performances were all done in one or at most two complete takes.

In the early years of an industry that had thus far recorded exclusively white artists, Victor was taking something of a risk by recording the Fisk Quartet. But though the company’s advertising copy described the spiritual’s religious content as "quaint conceptions" that "sometimes excite to laughter," it nevertheless labeled them "folk songs" rather than "coon songs," the only category reserved for Black music of any kind. Victor also took the unusual step of listing the names of the quartet on the label as a means of assuring the audience of the authenticity of the Fisk connection.[4] Their cover photo was in concert dress, white tie, and tails.[5] The page opposite Victor’s announcement of the first Fisk recording plugged a new release of Down Where the Big Bananas Grow by black-face comedians Collins and Harlan -- "another of those real darky shouts by the ever welcome 'Kings of Comedy.'"[6] However, Victor’s investment in the Fisks did pay off, as recordings of the Jubilee Quartet released between 1910 and the early 1920s, primarily by Victor, but also by Columbia, have been estimated at over two million copies sold.[7]

The exigencies of the recording industry had contributed to having the spiritual presented to the world in what was probably an even more intimate and refined style than that of the first Fisk ensembles. Again, this would seem to be fairly distant from the communal style and social context of the oppressive plantation conditions under which the spirituals were first sung. But insofar as the quartet arrangements still reflect the relatively straightforward choral harmonization’s worked out by Ella Sheppard and her fellow Jubilees, the melodic and harmonic language itself can be heard as remaining connected to the music of the plantation fields. These arrangements share several elements that point to the original musical textures of the slave singers discussed earlier: the call and response form with a song leader and harmonizers, the lead singer taking creative liberties with the melody or its upper harmonization, and the lower parts moving with characteristic harmonic progressions, albeit ones that have been decide upon in advance.[8]

Notes:

[1]Brooks (283) suggests that the quartet that made the first Victor recordings was drawn from a larger Fisk chorus, but without citing a reference. Ward (404) says that there was a period from 1916 to 1925 where Fisk supported a professional quartet and a student choir for fund-raising performances, citing Richardson 81.

[2]V. Hicks, 'Barbershop', The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 8/15/03), www.grovemusic.com.

[3]Brooks 284.

[4]Brooks 283-286.

[5]Document-Records DOCD-5533 cover.

[6]Brooks 289.

[7]Brooks 297-8.

[8]The harmonizations on the early recordings are fairly close to those preserved in John W. Work III’s later collection American Negro Songs and Spirituals (New York: Bonanza Books, 1940). John Work II and his folklorist brother Frederick published several collections and histories of the spiritual, most notably Folk Song of the American Negro (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1915).